With the emergence of online, electronic and phone-based transactions it has become difficult to verify all of the transactions a consumer has made each month to determine, for example, if the consumer was overcharged by their service provider for one or more of the transactions. For example, when a person uses a cellular phone, they may make a number of calls to a number of locations. Each of the locations may be widely dispersed geographically, and as such may have different tariff information and/or costs associated with each call.
It is difficult for the user to know what those tariffs and costs are, if they are applicable to certain calls, and if wrong and/or inflated information about the costs is being presented on their bill at the end of each month. For example, a call from Los Angeles to New York for one hour in the evening may have a different cost associated with the call than a call from Los Angeles to New York during the day. Similarly a call from Los Angeles to New York may differ in price from a call between San Francisco and New Jersey.
Likewise, a user who purchases items electronically, either via a cellular phone, personal digital assistant (“PDA”), smartcard or the like has a similar problem because the number of transactions can become numerous and the user may forget the exact prices and/or tariffs associated with each transaction. Therefore, the user who purchases items electronically may also be unable to ensure that the charges presented to them at the end of the month are accurate or inflated.
Making matters even more difficult, the user may not only forget what the tariffs were with regard to each transaction, but at the time the service provider presents the bill the user may not have any information whatsoever about the basis for the tariff information, which would be needed to verify whether the bill is accurate or inflated.